Smartphones and other types of portable, hand-held computing devices, such as tablet computers, are in widespread use today, most often in connection with entertainment, communications and office productivity. Most smartphones include a camera, and applications have been developed for using the camera for both general purpose photography as well as reading barcodes. In a typical barcode reading application an image feed from the camera is displayed on the display screen of the smartphone to enable the user to align the camera with the barcode. When aligned, the image is decoded.
A problem exists in that the general purpose camera is not typically optimized for barcode reading and the position of the field of view of the general purposes camera (typically to the backside of the mobile device) is not optimized for barcode reading. What is needed is a camera system optimized for barcode reading.